NOTICEThis is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted for the Harry S. Truman Library. A draft of this transcript was edited by the interviewee but only minor emendations were made; therefore, the reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate
the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONSThis oral history transcript may be read, quoted from, cited, and reproduced for purposes of research. It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.

MCKINZIE: Professor Goldsmith, many historians would be interested in
the kinds of people who worked on economic problems in the Truman administration.
Would you tell me a little bit about how you first became associated with
Government work in, I think, 1934?

GOLDSMITH: I started in 1934 at the Securities and Exchange Commission
in the then very small

[2]

Research Division headed by Doctor Paul Gourrich, and slowly worked up
as it was rapidly enlarged. I was for a number of years, from about '37
to about '39, in effect Deputy Director. When Dr. Gourrich got another
job within the SEC, I became the head of the Research Section which became
part of the Trading and Exchange Division. I stayed there until early
'42 when I transferred to the War Production Board, where I worked in
the economic side of the Planning Division, headed by Professor Simon
Kuznets, the Nobel Prize man. The boss of the whole show was Robert Nathan,
who since 1946 has had a fairly big consulting firm in Washington. I dealt
mainly there with problems of war finance. I also worked on war expenditures
and war production of other countries, allies as well as enemies, and
wrote several reports in this field. Finally I wrote

[3]

a long memorandum on the submarine war together with James R. Newman,
the well known writer.

I stayed on there until 1947, I think, when Mr. [Joseph] Dodge, whom
I met in Berlin (as I will refer to in a minute), asked me to come along
with him as economic adviser for the Austrian State Treaty negotiations
in Vienna. David Ginsburg, a very well-known Washington attorney, was
his legal adviser and really the brains.

Then after that I did a few odd jobs for the State Department until early
1948 when I went back to academic work, doing a three volume study: A
Study of Saving in the United States. Let me get back to the most
interesting part, which was the committee to evolve a plan for German
currency reform.

Mr. Dodge at that time, i.e. in 1945-46,

[4]

was the head of the Finance Division, in General [Lucius D.] Clay's Military
Government. On Clay's legal staff was Mr. David Ginsburg, who had, since
he was very young, been drafted into the Army and was at that time a captain
in the Army. He knew me because his wife and my wife were good friends,
and we lived in the same apartment house in Washington.

I paid him a short visit in December 1945, after I was through with acting
as statistical advisor to the American delegation to the Reparations Conference.
We had talks, and then in the spring, they asked me and Gerhard Colm,
who was by that time one of the top economists in the Bureau of the Budget.
So we went over and we right away decided it was best to invite Mr. Dodge
to join us. So it became a three-man group, the report which the mission
submitted in the spring of 1946,

[5]

is usually known as the CDG, Colm-Dodge-Goldsmith, report. We were for
about three months in Germany, traveled around half of the time and spent
half of the time in Berlin. We had really argued out the essence of the
plan on the plane flying over.

MCKINZIE: Whose original idea was it?

GOLDSMITH: Colm and myself, I can't disentangle the share of the two
of us, but we had the basis of it when we went to Germany. Of course,
we had to firm it up and one of the big jobs was, number one, to talk
to all possible people in Germany who could help, and number two, also
keep liaison, since at that time everything was quadripartite.

The British had a very good man at the head of their Finance Division.
His name was Paul Chambers, he's now Sir Paul Chambers. He's been

[6]

chairman of Imperial Chemicals and came to grief when a merger didn't
work out; but he's still a big shot. He came from the Indian civil service.

MCKINZIE: Who was the Frenchman?

GOLDSMITH: I forget the name of the man whom they had sent. I simply
don't know. They played no great role. The Russians had an excellent man,
Mr. Maletin who later became a vice minister of finance and may have already
have been that when he was sent to Berlin. He came from around Murmansk,
and his father was a fisherman, he was extremely smart, and also spoke
excellent academic Russian, like cultivated people do.

So, we sat around with them and had a number of very interesting discussions.
Of course, we never got together, everyone had his

[7]

instructions. One time, I remember that was around Easter 1946, the Russians
invited us to take a trip with them to Prague, through the Russian occupied
zone, but, I regret to say, since we just drove through, all we saw was
Leipzig where we stayed one night.

Since the people who had been high up in the Nazi council were ruled
out, we consulted a number of older people whom, generally, Dr. Colm knew
from before 1933. We talked with all of them and there were numerous plans
floating around. The report we made has been printed in one of the German
economic periodicals and was translated a few years later after it was
de-classified. So we traveled through the American zone, but also through
the French zone and British zone. As a matter of fact, there was at that
time a joint western sort of headquarters, I think in Minden.

The result of all this was a report which

[8]

when we left we submitted to General Clay, and it's that report which
later was published in Germany.

This report really had two essential parts. The two essential parts were,
first, that all monetary claims, currency, mortgages, whatever it was,
must be written down in the ratio of ten to one, so what had been a hundred
reichsmarks became ten deutsche marks . The second was, that since the
first step, of course, could not do anything from the point of view of
social equity, that the Germans were supposed to put some levy on those
people who gained by this operation and to some extent to compensate those
who lost. This was called an Ausgleichsabgabe -- equalization
fund.

General Clay accepted the first part of the plan, but did not accept
the second one, saying, "We are not here to introduce social

[9]

reforms into Germany. If the German Government wants to do that it's all
right, but I'm not going to do it." He simply regarded this equalization
levy as too close to socialism.

MCKINZIE: Had you discussed this point with him before you left?

GOLDSMITH: We had, of course, explained why we had made this suggestion.
There is a description of his reaction in his book on his experience as
military governor. I should say that I have the highest opinion of him
as administrator. He was extremely fair and he mercilessly dealt with
anybody on his staff who didn't have the answer. He never said so, but
I'm sure that the reason he did not want to go into this second part,
which we thought to be the really an intrinsic part of the whole plan,
was that this was against his conservative feelings.

[10]

He was a very close personal friend of Jimmy [James F.] Byrnes, and Mr.
and Mrs. Byrnes once visited Berlin, and of course, they stayed with the
Clays.

The Germans, as you probably know, never did go ahead with the Ausgleichsabgabe
we had envisaged. They did, of course, make some quite substantial compensation
to people who suffered from the Nazis. But that was not what we had intended.
Ours was to compensate the people who were losing by the currency reform.
They did a few odds and ends, but after a few years the country was prosperous
enough that nobody cared anymore. The ratio of ten to one unfortunately
was somewhat changed in the actual reform which came one year later. In
the early summer of 1948 the four powers broke up and at that time the
whole quadripartite arrangement exploded, and it became obvious that the
westerners were to do

[11]

in their zone what they wanted, and the Soviets in theirs what they wanted.
There had already been available for many years, a supply of German bank
notes printed, and the plates were never given to the Russians as far
as I know. In Austria they were not given to them -- and the man who was
the head of the finance division in Austria, the Professor of the University
of Minnesota, [Arthur W.] Marget, always regarded as one of his main achievements
that he had prevailed upon General Mark Clark not to hand the plates over
to the Russians.

In '49, then when the quadripartite arrangements broke up officially,
we put through a currency reform. But unfortunately, to be on the safe
side, the actual write down became one to fifteen, because they froze
part of the written down tenth.

My feeling has always been that this was a

[12]

serious mistake, because it led to a very low price level in Germany,
and wage level, and it gave them a great competitive advantage, but by
the fifties or so they lost it. But I think it was a serious mistake and
a lot of the troubles that we've had in international monetary affairs,
was due to their having over-cut the money supply.

When a devaluation is too sharp, you undervalue the currency and thereby
give an advantage. That's what the French did in the 1920's, and which
they did again in the late forties, with excellent effect each time; it's
even possible that Clay and his advisers did this consciously, because
late in '48 there came, of course, a great shift from treating the Germans
as a conquered country to treating them as future Allies and, hence, of
harming them as little as possible. That also led, of course,

[13]

to the stopping of reparations in kind.

All in all I'm quite proud of the plan. It's the nearest I've ever been
in this life to the higher levels of policymaking and I think even after
20 years this will stand up. It would even have been better if it had
been really a one to ten write down. It's difficult to figure out what
it actually was, because a part the new marks were frozen in a way that
differed according to all sorts of complicated regulations. The effect
was that the money supply really was cut effectively by well over one
to ten, I would say between one to twelve and one to fifteen, and I think
that this gap was responsible for a great deal of the trouble by undervaluing
the mark, the troubles we've had to the middle and late fifties. After
that, of course, this disappeared, and the Japanese began to be the "bad
boys."

[14]

MCKINZIE: At the time you were undergoing this study, did General Clay
or anyone else on your staff talk to you about the place of Germany in
the future of Europe?

GOLDSMITH: No. I think Clay was not given to general talk. He just handled
one thing after the other as it came. He was an operator and administrator.
I'm sure he had some ideas, but I don't remember that they were discussed.
There were always, in the military government, two wings: the one which
while, of course, not adopting the Morgenthau plan as such, was, however,
for a rather strict control of Germany; and the other one, which definitely
got the upper hand by the middle of '49, wanted to, as I say, hustle their
recovery so that the government became an ally.

In the early military government there were

[15]

very strange characters still around, who later turned out to be fellow
travelers. In the famous mission which [John K.] Galbraith headed, several
members fairly soon went to Eastern Germany -- Jurgen Kuczinsky being,
maybe, the main example.

It was a period of great interest. It is, of course, well-known that
the United States Government was rooked. We were paid in dollars, but
many people changed them, not at the official rate, because it was ridiculous,
but at the black market rate, into marks. But the messes and similar supply
organizations were accepting marks, so you could buy cigarettes at the
PX, and for ten cartons, known in Germany as a Stange, you could
transfer them into marks, at a thousand marks, I think. With that you
could then go into a PX and buy yourself some uniforms or whatever. This
fantastic thing went on for

[16]

several months. Colm and I once were riding in a car driven by a GI. We
discussed how some of these loopholes could be plugged. Finally the chauffeur
turned around, and said, "Give up, there are about a thousand of
you, but there are a hundred thousands of us who try to get around it;"
and so it was. It was a fantastic thing.

Then Clay or Mrs. Clay hit upon the idea to regularize some of these
things. They opened a shop in the American zone with Germans who wanted
to sell things, silver and so forth, and there would be a price put on
it, and then anybody could buy it. We hoped that way to get these people
better prices and also keep out swindlers. He regarded that, and in a
way it was, as a solution for the Germans who had to live on selling their
things. I know that I bought one of these big atlases for the equivalent

[17]

of, well, six packages of cigarettes. I did it on occasion, but there
were fellows who made little fortunes. It took the higher-ups quite a
while to get wise.

The head of the finance division of the military government was Bernard
Bernstein, Colonel Bernstein; a very smart and tough lawyer who has been
in private practice for many years in New York. He tried to get these
things changed. He was there for months and months, and as a matter of
fact, he had been one of the assistant general counsels of Morgenthau.
A few days before the North African invasion, he was called over and General
[George C.] Marshall said that he was being made, this very day, lieutenant
colonel and he would be in charge of finance operations. So, he landed
with the troops in Algiers, and took over the Banks of Algiers, finance
etc., and then he was transferred

[18]

to Germany. Bernstein, of course, tried to get these rules changed, and
finally they were.

MCKINZIE: I wonder if you could say a little bit about the Germans that
you dealt with?

GOLDSMITH: We looked up everybody not associated with the Nazi regime.
We talked to everybody we thought could give us ideas including some well-known
professors, and I still think that the two men who were most helpful and
most understanding, were two very old professors [Eugen] Schmalenbach
in Cologne, and [Alfred] Weber in Heidelberg. But we also talked, of course,
to some bankers and some economists, dozens and dozens of people. And
there were at least a dozen plans around, currency reform plans. Also
there were German books describing all of these currency reform plans.
Well, I think that ours--

[19]

not because we were the powers that be,-- was really better; but some
of them were very similar. There aren’t that many possibilities.

The Germans were, to a good extent, people who Colm of I had known, but
a number we had not known well. We always visited the finance ministers
of the different Laender.

There was Dr. Veit who later became the head of the Regional Central
Bank of Hessen. As you know, the Germans have a central bank-- but they
have also semi-independent banks in each of the states (Laender). They
didn’t exist at that time but some of the people we dealt with later
became heads. While the advice of all these people was useful and we tried
to get their reactions, I don’t think we really got too much out
of them. I think we assessed the psychological situation better then they
did. They had, of course, lived through four

[20]

terrible years, so they were ultra-cautious. At least some of them. I
would now have difficulty distinguishing what one said from the other.
We really talked to most of the people who in the next decade became important;
not to Adenauer. Adenauer as you know, might even have been in British
custody, but we certainly didn't talk to him. But we did go to Cologne
and talk to Schmalenbach who had been -- he was in retirement --the leading,
business economist in Germany, in the academic sense. I mean as if he
had been at the Harvard Business School. Alred Weber, of course, was a
younger brother of Max Weber and very universal-minded like his brother,
not a specialist on currency reforms.

We also talked to a few other people that had been in the Reichsbank.
As I said, we really had the plan in essence when we came over on the
plane. So what we really did is to see

[21]

whether there was any hitch and whether there couldn't be something done
better. Some things, of course, we did do better. We had quite a good
staff, because in addition to the report itself, which was only, about
a hundred pages -- and Clay read it in its entirety -- we had back-up
memoranda. Nobody knew at that time how much currency was around to make
close estimates. So we had sample surveys, which our military government
introduced into Germany, along the line it had been done by Michigan University
during the war. There were some people who were familiar with that in
the American military government headquarters in Frankfurt and they organized
a survey in Germany where they tried to find out how much currency people
had, on a sample basis, and what they would do in this or that situation.

[22]

MCKINZIE: Did this kind of information come in steadily and voluntarily
from the Soviet delegates here?

GOLDSMITH: Oh, absolutely nothing. It was a very formal relationship.
I don't know whether to be so positive -- but I think we always met in
a building which was a quadripartite facility, which constituted a free
zone. It was physically in the American zone. No, no, the Russians from
the beginning always were only interested in getting what they
wanted.

MCKINZIE: That was clear to you at the time?

GOLDSMITH: Yes, that was clear. They were pretty tough to deal with,
but Maletin, I repeat, was a very competent and very smart man; and he
was the delegation. The second man on was a university professor
who ran around in a colonel's uniform, but spoke only rarely. Some of
them

[23]

spoke German, had learned enough of it so that sometimes I could talk
with them. Maletin didn't speak English, and I don't think German; but
he had, of course, his interpreters and we had ours. I had great respect
for him; I don't know whether he is still alive. When I was in the Soviet
Union in 1963 I tried to reach him, but I never had a reply. He was either
out of town or just didn't want to meet me. At that time he was Deputy
Minister of Finance; he must be retired now.

MCKINZIE: Could you tell me a little bit about how you happened to go
to the Paris Peace Conference in 1946?

GOLDSMITH: Oh, that was very simple. That was headed by Professor [James
Waterhouse] Angell, and he had asked Homer Jones of, I think, the FDIC
at that time to be his statistical advisor.

[24]

For some reason or another, Jones didn't want to go, and he suggested
they ask me which they did. I didn't mind, because I could speak French;
so that's how I got there. It was quite interesting. For the first time
I worked in diplomatic negotiations. There were twelve countries involved
and it wasn't like victors and vanquished; we were all supposed to be
Allies. By that time the Russians weren't in but the Yugoslavs were; and
the Yugoslav delegate, whose name I've forgotten -- later became a minister
-- was extremely active. What was to be determined was the distribution
of the spoils, the percentages of the reparations to be taken out of Germany.
Each delegation, of course, wanted to get the maximum percentage. The
Yugoslav delegate was very, very good, and he must have gotten a few percent
extra. It all proved to be of no avail, because a few months

[25]

later reparations were stopped in the Western zones. The chairman was
the French delegate, a very conservative French economist named Jacque
Rueff, who is still alive and still insists that the world must go back
to the gold standard.

I remember the Greeks. The Greeks like everyone else set down what they
had lost to the Germans In doing so the Greek delegation came up with
a fantastic figure, and I tried to point out that this was larger than
the total national wealth of Greece. They took that very ill and regarded
me as an enemy of Greece. Finally it didn't matter, but in December '45
everybody there still thought there was money to be had.

We argued a great deal about these submissions and worked things out
diplomatically. The figures have been published: the Belgian delegate,
after it was over, simply handed them

[26]

to his central bank and they were printed in an issue of the monthly
bulletin of the Banque Nationalede Belgigue. The conference lasted
about six or eight weeks and was very interesting. We from the beginning
said that we would only claim as much as we had alien assets in the United
States. That was to make sure that we didn't have to cough anything up;
we had no interest in getting anything. These were our instructions, and
that's more or less how it came out. So, we just insisted that we got
a high enough percentage that would cover what we had taken here, like
some chemical company subsidiaries, and a few other things. We wanted
to be sure that nobody laid claim to that.

The British would like to have had something, but they were also moderate;
but the other ones fought for the highest possible share -- I remember
when the Belgians thought their quota was too low,

[27]

they sent for support from Brussels and the finance minister came down.

MCKINZIE: Did you know any of the delegates from other nations at that
time?

GOLDSMITH: No, I'm pretty sure I did not. I have since been in touch
with a number of them, but I don't think that anybody knew anybody. The
American delegation was to a good extent academics, people temporarily
in the State Department; but the other delegations were mostly civil servants.

MCKINZIE: There were quite a few, as you point out, academic economists
in the State Department then, and there was a kind of "Hullian view,"
or a view put forward by Will Clayton, his assistant, at the end of the
war which was that the "brave new world" was going to have to
be an economically integrated world. That there were

[28]

going to have to be across the board reductions in tariffs and there were
going to have to be all kinds of unprecedented changes in the economics.

GOLDSMITH: Well, I think that's probably true. I was aware of it, but
when it came to the hard facts, these things went by the board; but both
of these things had nothing to do with us, so I really don't know.

MCKINZIE: Well, I was wondering.

GOLDSMITH: No, both the reparations conference and the German currency
reform had nothing to do with that.

MCKINZIE: But in your discussions of other kind of action...

GOLDSMITH: I simply don't remember, but I doubt it very much. I think
these fellows had for

[29]

several years, after all, been around the State Department, negotiating
with our Allies and so forth, so I think they had become reasonably realistic.
I may have met Mr. Clayton once. We mentioned the Paris Conference, well
I was there also for a month or two months. Then there was a London meeting
early in '48; that was my last job with the State Department, and I think
Willard Thorp was the head there. I saw much more of him when I was on
the OECD in 1962-65, and he was at that time the head of the AID committee
-- rank of Ambassador and lived in a very nice house -- and so I saw him
a number of times. But he was really my boss at these two conferences.
At one of them we got involved in the Trieste question. At that time the
wonderful idea was to make Trieste a free port, so it could become --
it always had been, but so it could become again, or even more so, a great
shipbuilding center, because it would be a free trade

[30]

zone. The food would come in without duty, so they would have much lower
food costs and, hence, supposedly lower wages, and that way could out-compete
other shipyards that did not have these advantages. But, as you well know,
it ended by simply the Italians getting the "A" zone and the
Yugoslavs the "B" zone, which was more or less always evident.
But Trieste as a free city, was an interesting idea although the fate
of Danzig should have been a warning sign, but in the case of Trieste
it never eventuated.

MCKINZIE: Could you speak about the Austrian treaty on which you worked?

GOLDSMITH: This dragged out for five months, haggling over every piece
of German owned property in Austria. It was one of the most frustrating
five months I've spent, Vienna at that time was still down and out, a
beautiful city and beautiful

[31]

surroundings, but you couldn't go into the Russian occupied zone. I did
it once without knowing. Nothing happened, but I was given a dressing
down. But, as I said, over every factory the Germans had acquired, each
side worked on a paper, we were trying to prove that it had been taken
away from the original owners, and it should be given back to them. The
Russians said these were voluntary commercial deals and hence should now
be given to the occupying powers.

MCKINZIE: You mentioned that there was an oil refinery in...

GOLDSMITH: Oh, yes, that I have forgotten the name of, but Walter Levy
knows all about that. So don't ask me about that; he knows it from beginning
to end and he's an oil specialist. At that time the Soviets were afraid
of being

[32]

short of oil. This was before the big finds in Western Siberia and elsewhere,
so they were tremendously anxious to get as their properties, the Zistersdorf
Oil, and we wanted to avoid that partly because it had been American owned
and the American company -- I don't want to say which one of the big companies
-- had a very smart representative in Vienna, who helped our delegation
quite a lot and so we obviously tried to do the best for him. But, moreover,
this was our State Department policy that whatever was American property
we wanted to get back.

MCKINZIE: But you regarded this work on the Austrian settlement as extremely
painstaking and particularly trying -- an item by item....

GOLDSMITH: Item by item -- oh, it was terrible. This was also important
politics, and the head of the Russian delegation later became Ambassador
to

[33]

India, but he looked really like a Turk. You wouldn't like to meet him
at night. He was a very disagreeable fellow. There were one or two better
people on as economists including one who later became a Soviet official
at the U.N. But they had strict instructions.

We had a political adviser, of course; he later became counselor at the
Rome embassy, but he's dead now. There was Walter Levy, of course, for
oil. I did some of the economics, and I had one assistant named Strauss,
who was an old friend of mine; he was in the State Department, so I had
asked for him since he knew German and knew the Austrian affairs. So he
mostly worked through the cases for us. The French. delegate was a general.
The French secretary to the delegation was the son of Paul Valery, who
now is Ambassador at the Quaff d'Orsay and represents France at the OECD.
He wrote

[34]

beautiful French. The minutes rotated. When the French delegate had been
the chairman he had to write them. Of course, he didn't; so Valery did
it in beautiful French, of course. I once was in Paris, in his wonderful
apartment, and the Cezanne and the things that hang on the wall there
-- pictures by friends of the family, and so on. But he was an interesting
man!

One of the British economists I got fairly friendly with, and he is now
an official at the International Bank. His name is Cyril Martin. The Russian
attaché I don't remember; and the British delegate, was a foreign
office man, who later became an ambassador or something. I don't know
who the French economist was. I don't think they really had any. It was
the smallest delegation. The power situation being what it was, this delegate
knew well enough that what he said was of very limited weight. It's true,
however,

[35]

they occupied Tirol and Vorarlberg, but there was very little property
situated there.

MCKINZIE: You referred once or twice now to the business of "the
power situation being what it was;" I take it that all of these people
were acutely aware that in the end there was going to be

GOLDSMITH: Yes, as a matter of fact, it was really embarrassing because
-- but not for the Russians -- ours were negotiations between the Allies
and it was clear to everybody from the beginning that if the United States
really definitely decided on something they would get it; so, why waste
all that time. But sometimes we did become convinced that they were right;
we weren't always in the right. In all the quadripartite things where
there were three on the Allied side, it was essentially the United States
with two

[36]

assistants.

MCKINZIE: Did you have any talks with economists in the Department about
the Marshall plan?

GOLDSMITH: Well, I had been around a few weeks in the State Department,
when they first drew it up. There was a group of economists headed by
Charles Kindleberger, and I worked with him for a few weeks before going
over. That was before going over to the Paris peace conference; but I
was not really close to those discussions.

Marshall only had thrown out this idea, and then it had to be worked
out, and there was a group of pretty good economists with Kindleberger
the head of it; and I think there was Isaiah Frank, who is now in Johns
Hopkins, and a few other pretty good economists.

MCKINZIE: Why did you decide to leave the Government service in 1948?

[37]

GOLDSMITH: By that time, you know, I had been in the SEC from 1934 on,
and I wanted, really, to get into an academic type job. I started with
a large research job, the study of saving, which was a special project
financed by the Life Insurance Association.

When that was over, I worked for the National Bureau, and then I got
into, first, New York University and then Yale. After '48 I could have
gone back to the SEC, because you had the right; but, number one, they
were at that time in Philadelphia -- they had been shifted to Philadelphia
during the war -- and, number two, by that time it was dead. It had been,
of course, one of the most active agencies in the Government and had had
among other commissioners Justice [William O.] Douglas, John Kennedy,
Sr., and a number of people who later became big-shots. [James M.] Landis,
became dean of Harvard Law

[38]

School; [Ferdinand] Pecora had been counsel of the Stock Exchange investigation,
etc. So, they had had an extraordinary group of commissioners the first
three or four years -- Jerome Frank, also. Then, as I said, they were
shifted to Philadelphia, to which I didn't want to go, and, then, we knew
that during the war there wouldn't be the slightest interest in securities.
So, I went to the War Production Board, and when that was through the
SEC was still in Philadelphia. I didn't like to go there and I knew the
commission finally would come to Washington; and it had pretty much by
that time become routinized, and for more than ten years was down and
out. It continued to work, but did not play a great role in the Government.
It's really only in the last five years that they've come back.

MCKINZIE: But that's where your interest would have been?

[39]

GOLDSMITH: Oh, yes, if I had stayed in the Government I would probably
have gone back to the SEC, because in the State Department after all,
we were all temporaries and not Foreign Service officers, so you couldn't
stay there. And I don't think I would have liked to. The War Production
Board, of course, was ephemeral, and the SEC for reasons explained, didn't
look like it would be too interesting. And, as I say, by that time I was
44, so it was then or never.